Research indicates that the most effective IT governance approach is a federative approach. In this approach, IT guidelines are developed at enterprise level but the actual IT decisions are made decentral. The pure centralised model however appears to be more popular, but less successful. In an article about "Lessons from Iraq and Katrina", Bill Hall states that "From the organizational point of view, the processes of orientation and decision making must be moved closer to the periphery, where the deciders and actors can react faster and more accurately within the limits of what they are capable of observing."

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Many architects put a lot of effort in rationalising the process of architecture decision making. These rational approaches to decision making typically break down in two stages: the problem identification stage and the problem solution stage. The idea behind the rational approach is that decision making follows a systematic method of logical reasoning steps that - if performed correctly - automatically lead to the optimal solution for the given problem. Behind this idea however hide two flawed assumptions: i) the world is well defined and ii) there's enough time to consider all the necessary combinations. To make the rational approach in complex decision making come to a decision on time, the architect is by definition forced to oversimplify.

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To date, architects very often operate as soloists. Soloists with a knowledge of construction paradigms, patterns, technologies, methods, etc. But as the construction space keeps expanding, the required knowledge is increasing: technology stacks and tiers are added, construction techniques evolve, the line between off-the-shelve and bespoke development is fading and reusable services are becoming commodities and their number growing rapidly. As a result the architect (and engineering) population will specialise more and more.

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Often the best way to express a design is by means of a visual model. There's quite some modeling languages around, to name just a few: Archimate, UML, BPMN, EPC, IDEF, Use case maps, E3value. The complexity of the average language (an important improvement area) forces the architect to look for a tool to support his modeling effort. Architects who don't like the concept of being restricted to a single language and / or tool (a good habit I believe) will not likely invest in expensive tools.

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The future will bring more and more surprising products based on the reuse of digital 'residue'. These residue based products are products created on the residue of other products. To illustrate let me give you some examples:
- mobile phone positioning data (a residue mobile phone users leave when then are linked to the network) to calculate car traffic; a valuable input for car navigation devices (e.g. Vodafone and TomTom);
- (tagged) bookmarks collected by individual users in their browser can be used to build resource taxonomies (e.g. del.icio.us, mypip.com). An intranet version would be a simple and probably very effective way to manage corporate knowledge (especialy when it also enables highlighting).
- gaming data (e.g. a game to find similar characteristics) to create picture indexes; a valuable input for a search engine wanting to improve the relevance of image search (e.g. the espgame.org and peekaboom.org).

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Applications get more and more detached form the infrastructure they are running on. The same goes for the architectures of both. In the most extreme scenario, architectural design choices related to the infrastructure are made completely independent from the applications running on the infrastructure. For applications, the infrastructure in most cases is a given. One could compare the relationship between applications and the infrastructure with the way electrical appliciances relate to electricity (loosely coupled with plugs and sockets).

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The importance of creativity as a strategic competence is growing rapidly; it is key to survival in the next era. Creativity is not limited to products and services but also to the way value chains / networks are structured and the nodes (partners) in the network are implemented. Technology will penetrate deeper and deeper in the execution and will push humans out of significant parts of the value chain. This transformation is not an optimisation of today's operating model. In order to make this transformation happen, organisations will have to brake free from the architectural paradigms of the past and open up for a fundamental new way of building.

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